Tjalf Sparnaay lives and works in Hilversum, Netherlands. He is a self-taught artist, who whose realistic oil paintings are based on everyday objects. He paints everyday items such as a breakfast, crushed coca-cola can, a fried egg, a half eaten sandwich, cheeseburgers and desserts, a bag of chips with mayonnaise, a Dutch raw herring with a little flag, and a bunch of tulips still wrapped in cellophane. Fried eggs, French fries, sandwiches and ketchup bottles, Barbie dolls, marbles and autumn leaves. Artist Tjalf Sparnaay visualizes these trivial subjects and inflates them to enormous formats, an assault on the senses. His paintings hit the retina like bolts of lightning in a clear blue sky. No other painter confronts us quite so clearly with ordinary objects that we hold dear.
Since 1987, he has been working on his imposing oeuvre, constantly seeking new images that have never been painted before. What he calls Megarealism is part of the contemporary global art movement of Hyperrealism, and Sparnaay is now considered one of the most important painters working in that style.
